Chapter Text
Per usual, General Armitage Hux doesn’t know quite what to expect from Kylo Ren except that it can’t be anything pleasant, especially not at this hour. The time — nearly three hundred hours — grates on Hux more than the advent of being summoned by this hulking boy of a man, a pretender. Three hundred hours. Never mind that Hux was already up, that he almost always is when it feels like the foundation of the Order, his Order, is crumbling beneath his feet. But Hux isn’t stupid, and he doesn’t forget. He remembers how to bow and scrape. He remembers how to keep his thoughts quiet and his visage proud and alert.
“Reporting as ordered, Supreme Leader,” Hux greets upon entering the meeting room, standing tall and falling into parade rest with his thick woolen greatcoat swishing around his polished boots, and his gloved hands lightly interlocked low and smartly behind him. The small yet well-appointed place which seats four attendants and the presenter they’d face is empty except for the general and his newly self-promoted ruler. “What is your command?” Hux asks him.
Kylo Ren turns from the twinkling void beyond the large trapezoidal viewport to regard Hux. They hold each other’s gazes momentarily, Hux’s mossy green eyes peering slightly up into Ren’s hazel irises. Hazel, yes. They always seem so much darker than they are, like Ren’s unkempt and overgrown hair, but it’s rare to see him like this, unmasked. Hux would much prefer him covered, to be spared from his sloppy presentation, but like virtually everything on his mind, he keeps that to himself and merely waits for Ren to speak.
Before the Supreme Leader bothers, he looks Hux up and down as if considering his approach. The wrinkle across his nose evens out, but the corner of his mouth twitches. A grimace? A grin? It’s impossible to tell. Then he allows, “At ease, Hux,” despite omitting his subject’s rank. “You are a trusted advisor.”
Isn’t this a tribunal? The room is too small to accommodate the entire High Command, but a few of its members could gather in an intimate assembly to witness Hux’s deposition for initially contesting Ren’s elevation over his own. He clenches his jaw, willing his mind back into silence before it’s too late, before Ren sees inside of him. “I… Yes,” he agrees with none of his practiced poise. “Of course. How can I assist you?”
The new Supreme Leader asks about the old, of his tactics, of his plans. Ren knows nearly nothing of them, nothing his usurped title should demand. He has spent his time here as a vicious dog, as a threat, as a treasure hunter, some dark monk, and an admittedly remarkable pilot, but never a student of politics or military procedure as if to purposely distance himself from his immediate heritage. Ren is, in a way, helpless, although it’s stunning to hear him essentially admit as such.
Despite the recent and ongoing chaos, despite his uncertainty, Hux is glad to provide his aid. He’s glib, flattering. He tells Ren that Snoke is dead, that his goals mean nothing when the might of the First Order is now in his living hands. Snoke may have rescued the Imperial Remnant from certain ruin, but his mysticism, his waiting, and all of his delegation left his domain weak and stagnant. “You could fulfill the dream of so many of our forebears,” Hux assures with genuine hope and pride, seeing himself as the guiding hand of revolution, as ever, in all but name. “You could truly rebuild the Empire.”
He should like that. Ren should appreciate the obsequities, but all he does is glare, and then he looms in toward Hux close enough to knock heads. Hux holds his ground, but leans away from Ren whose akimbo stance spreads his voluminous, leathery black cloak like wings extended in a dominance display. “My forebears shaped the galaxy as we know it, General. Your bloodline produces lieutenants and lickspittles,” Ren, proclaims. “Do not speak of my people in the same breath as yours.”
It has been a very long time since Hux has felt small. He isn’t. He isn’t small. Slim, but not small, not for decades. Not even Snoke with his towering height and gargantuan projections ever truly managed to make Hux feel quite so much like a boy again. Snubbed. Reviled. Used. Snubbed. Reviled. Used. And then, as if his brutal mood had never appeared at all, Ren straightens, his expression mercurially softening, becoming pensive instead of deadly. “Tell me of our resources,” he inquires. “What do we have? What do we lack? Who threatens us? Who might we use?”
“Whom might we use?” Hux thinks. What he says is: “We possess a formidable fleet of…” He stops. Should he have said “you possess”? The uncertainty, the self-censorship, the ridiculousness of this situation — it’s too much. Armitage Hux tells himself to be patient. He’s been patient for so long, and now it will be only a few months, maybe a year until reckless abandon finally and fortuitously does this overgrown toddler in.
One more hour, maybe two. That would still be early — late? — but it’d be fine, especially for a soldier or one who keeps their hours as Hux once did before this reign of chaos. One, maybe two fewer MIA reports to file or condolences written to nexts of kin. One day, just one day when his peers look upon him without wishing they saw his father Brendol, without being seen for the weak little bastard that man had dismissed him as. One day to be recognized, to be appreciated for all he’s done. Just one, maybe two. That’s all it would have taken.
“Well, Ren, I suppose it doesn’t really matter what we have,” reports Hux matter-of-factly. “It’s certainly less than we did before, no thanks to you.” He smirks morosely as Ren glowers. “A trusted advisor?” He practically chokes on the words. “If you had trusted my advice, the Resistance would be destroyed, and we’d still have the Supremacy, its fleet, and its foundries and shipyards to build more all while mobile. We’d have decades of supplies and research, generations of minds building things you only know how to break. Phasma…” Hux is almost to upset to speak her name. Almost. “We’d have her if you hadn’t been so busy playing hard-to-get with your desert trash rat. And Crait? We’d have ended this long before that debacle if you’d really ever considered consulting me. Ren, I was dragged through hell and back for Starkiller because you decided to throw a family reunion instead of defending the base. He made me get you, Snoke did. There were hardly five units of blood left in you by the time I found you napping in the snow. I almost died for you like everyone else, and now you want my advice?”
Kylo Ren leans casually against the edge of the central table and cocks an eyebrow. “I forgot how fond you are of your speeches, Hux. Are you done yet?”
The general shakes his head hard enough to liberate a few strands of his honeyed copper hair from its carefully gelled and parted style. “No. You asked for my advice, and here it is: do whatever you want, and I’ll continue to fix your messes.” Whatever he meant to say next dissolves into a single wry chortle. “My mother was” —Hux searches for the term— “I suppose a princeling like you would’ve called her a scullery maid, did you know that? Everyone else does. I’m sure she’d be proud to see how far I’ve climbed, cleaning up after the Supreme Leader instead of a mere commandant.”
Hux isn’t sure why he’s still alive, but as long as he has breath in his lungs, he’s not quite finished. “And it wasn't only our ships and our officers; it was my children, some so young they’d never even learned what they’d be fighting for, let alone tasted battle. And Snoke. You know I don’t care. You know what he put me through, but do you really think I don’t realize you killed him? You’re a liar. You’re an infant. You should have run back to your high and mighty mother’s pretty white skirts while you still could. Lieutenants? Lickspittles? At least all my people were on the right side of the war.”
“Do you feel better now, Hux?”
Hux blinks. Yes, he does… and then there is the doom. “Supreme Leader, I don’t know what came over me. Please, I— Ugh!” Hux staggers back as a wet plop splatters at his feet. He stares daggers up at the fleshy, moist lips of its source until he follows the finger protruding violently from Ren’s massive clenched fist.
“Go ahead,” Ren encourages. “Clean it up.”
“No,” Hux asks softly, wiping a fleck of saliva from his cheek along with an angry, wayward tear.
“You’re not very good at this,” Ren appraises. “Perhaps you’d make a better lieutenant.”
Memories threaten to overwhelm Hux. Snubbed. Reviled. Used. Glass embedded in his palms like splinters. Spilled liquor dripping down his pants. Piss joining it when Brendol’s fist around his wrist to pull him away and into a beating. “Clean it up,” Brooks had said, and so Hux had tried. How was he to know that was joke when the man had demanded so much more behind closed doors? So much worse? But Ren isn’t joking.
This will be the last time Hux finds himself on his knees. The number of times he’s made that very promise is known only to the stars, but this is the last. It’s the last time he fully flattens himself like a toad lest a fault be found in his performance. He tries not to think of how Ren’s unwashed boots have just tramped across the formerly pristine floor. The mud beneath them doesn’t matter. The gore. The shit. Hux slides his tongue across the finished steel in tight rows like a mop, his body rocking as he laps up the frothy slime.
There. It’s done. This is the end. Hux expects no less when Ren approaches him. It’s the thing he wants the second most, the thing he’s had to push back almost all of his life: the commitment to making everything go away. No more snubbing of his rank or oversight of his abilities and efforts. No more revulsion at his existence that neither he nor his mother ever chose. No more jokes. No more licking. No more sucking. No more crying. No more kneeling. No more begging. Nothingness seems so nice by comparison, but Hux knows he deserves more. At the very least, he deserves to make Ren pay for this.
“Make me pay?” Ren asks. He lifts Hux’s chin with a brush of the Force until he’s standing on his knees at a height with his lightsaber, and only inches away from it. “I could have left you to perish in the throne room. A dozen times I could have left you, and yet here you are making the same poor choices. You’re the expert, Hux,” Ren insists as if in this one case he, too, is not, “so tell me: how do we deal with traitors?”
Hux’s already pale face blanches. He can smell Ren’s sweat through all his layers, a cold, dry must as the words are Forced from him. “Interrogate them. Corral any collaborators. Question the entire chain of them, or observe them for further leads. Then, indenture or execute them depending on the extent of their crimes.”
“Hmmph. All your false claims, your defamation… Let’s say that’s dismissible, but what is the sentence for a direct threat against your Supreme Leader?”
Hux again shakes his head. “I didn’t say…” He drones off. It doesn’t matter, not with Ren. He already knows this. “No one would dare such a thing.” Hux swallows. “No one has.”
“And if he did?”
“The aforementioned procedures would almost certainly culminate with execution at the discretion of His Leadership. A public ceremony for a public offence to restore morale. A private termination is advised to otherwise protect it. Expected methods include death by hanging, firing squad, or ejection from an airlock.”
The black monolith of Kylo Ren towers over Hux and his fate like a god of judgement. He searches Hux’s face, but he doesn’t probe far, he doesn’t have to. There is hostility, but also a certain loyalty in this man. Not to his new commander or even the First Order, but to his personal vision of the future. It’s beautiful, maybe the most beautiful version of the galaxy Kylo has ever seen. It’s calm. United. Elegant. Fair. The Supreme Leader rests his hand on Hux’s shoulder before returning to admire the view. “Rise, General. We’ve all had a difficult week. Take a few days to gather yourself.”
Glad to shake away the eerie, unwanted gesture, Hux stands rigidly. Suspension disguised as leave? Fine. That’s fine. That’s good. “Thank you, sir,” Hux says, nodding toward the turned back of the now silent Ren. Then he straightens his uniform with a few tugs, sweeps his hair into place, breathes, and leaves to find the nearest lavatory in which to empty his stomach.